Cannibal Bunnies Review

The
Good

The
Bad

No zoom feature makes things really frustrating sometimes.

Cannibal Bunnies is great, slightly demented fun on the iPad

Did you ever play Lemmings and think, “hey, this game is great, but you know what it really needs? Terrible things happening to adorable animals, preferably with a suitable amount of blood.” If you did, then I want you to do two things: 1) make an appointment with a local psychiatrist (because, wow, that’s really messed up) and 2) buy Cannibal Bunnies for the iPad.

There isn’t really much of a story here, but the setting is pretty funny: a bunch of pink bunnies who are going about their everyday business suddenly find themselves being terrorized by an invisible force (read: the players) that is hell-bent on picking them up and locking them in birdhouse-like cages. To make matters worse, there are a bunch of monstrous purple and red bunnies roaming around the landscape and gobbling the pink ones up. Essentially, the pink bunnies are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and players are the rock.

From the moment the game starts up, it makes no secret of showing its players about just what type of messed up/twisted experience lies in store for them. No, really: check out the intro video above and you’ll see what I mean.

The actual gameplay is highly reminiscent of the Lemmings games, where the pink bunnies are walking around maps peppered with sudden drops and other hazards. Players have to pick them up and move them to hanging cages before time runs out. Eventually other factors come into play, like how different types of carrots can either strengthen or sicken the pink bunnies (the latter is particularly entertaining to watch, since sick bunnies infect their friends and cause them to repeatedly vomit), cages can only hold a certain number of pink bunnies (if they’re overloaded, they’ll fall off screen) or how the evil bunnies will roll boulders down slopes.

There’s a ton of content here, too. The game contains over forty-five levels, all of which are pretty quick to play through, but are also pretty challenging. It’s fairly easy to beat a level, but it’s incredibly difficult to actually get a perfect score. As a result, there’s a lot of replay value in Cannibal Bunnies.

Visually, the game looks pretty spectacular. Everything is presented in traditional 2D, but the environments and animation look simply stunning. It’s particularly entertaining to watch the pink bunnies transform when they eat a carrot, either for better or worse. The environments also look pretty slick, too, but it’s the characters that contain the most visual charm. Meanwhile, the sound effects and music are also wonderfully done.

The only real problem is that there’s no option to zoom in or out on a map, which can make things really frustrating because it becomes impossible to see the action happening off screen in a level. This means that it’s possible for a bunch of pink bunnies to either get eaten, fall off a cliff, or meet some other kind of untimely death before they’re ever seen by a player.

For the most part, Cannibal Bunnies is delightful. As the game progresses, things stay challenging and fast-paced enough to keep the players entertained. It’s strange and weird and adorably twisted, and there’s no way fans of puzzle games like Lemmings won’t enjoy it to death.